Electronic catalog systems, such as those associated with large e-commerce sites, often store large quantities of catalog data to which updates are frequently made. The updates may be received by an update processing system from various sources of catalog data. The quantity of updates received over an extended period of time, such as several months or years, may be too large to enable the updates to be conveniently managed in a single database. While much of this data will likely never need to be accessed again, the data may still need to be preserved. Therefore, a portion of the data may be deleted from the database and moved to archive storage systems. Archive storage systems may also be used to store updates to the electronic catalog systems.
Archive storage systems work well for storing hundreds or thousands of objects that are on the order of multiple megabytes. However, such storage systems often do not work as well for storing hundreds of millions to billions of very small records (e.g., kilobytes in size). Additionally, when querying archived data, retrieving the desired archived data is often a challenge that requires a separate search of the archive media. Therefore, it may be difficult to obtain a combination of the archived and non-archived data in response to a single request.